9.09.2012

Homemade Invitations: Boarding Pass Style

I still can't wrap my head around how fast this year went by. It seems like I was just making Boston's first birthday invitations. Whew. But, nonetheless, I survived another invitation making season for the B-man.

It was a fun time.

These are my scatter brained (bare with me) thoughts on making the invites.....

After I narrowed down the theme, airplanes, I thought it was only appropriate that they look more like boarding passes than regular birthday invitations. So I set off to use that dandy ol' website called Etsy to search "airplane boarding pass invitations" for some inspiration/ideas. There were lots that were really cute. The ones that I liked the best I printed out. And out of those that I printed out, I created my own. Basically, I borrowed bits and pieces and ideas from them, but I created my own unique, one of a kind invitation.

For almost every invitation I make, I always go to Paper Planet in Fort Worth because they have the best paper/card stock ever. Not to mention, their whole shop is full of ideas and cuteness. And since they sell huge sheets of heavy duty card stock I was able to get 5 sheets which ended up making 35 invitations (which was good because I took all of the orange paper they had on hand, and momma wasn't waiting for them to get another shipment) and that's exactly how many I needed to mail out.

After getting the paper, I narrowed down the design I wanted/my ideas of how I wanted them to look (a long invitation that had a pocket to slip the "boarding pass" in) and explained them to Jer. :) With him having all the mathematical skills in our house he then went to work on the measurements of how big the invitations needed to be in order to fit into the pre-made 9x4 brown envelopes I got from hobby lobby just right. They calculations needed to be just right in order to maximize our 5 pages we had. There was no room for error or mess ups.

We then started making our marks and drawing our lines for cutting. Each invitation was cut long ways and then folded in half to start the bottom part of the "pocket."

Next we measured where we wanted the actual pocket to be (the slit). It took a little playing with but we decided that it needed to be somewhere more near the bottom than the top (since we were adding not only the invitation but the rsvp and the fun fact about Boston) and we wanted the slits to be at an angle.

I wanted them to be a "true" pockets/slits so I used my exacto knife to slice only the middle part of the paper from side to side. The marks you see below are on the inside of the invitation so you wouldn't be able to see them.

They are just big enough for the invitation, rsvp and fun fact to fit because the sides would be glued down.

I know that description was fast and furious but let's cut to the chase. This is what we ended up with:

The blue polka dot strip is washi tape. The "Boston's 2nd Birthday" label on the outside of the invitation I created, printed on card stock and taped it to the washi tape. So that when they opened the envelope and pulled out the invitation they would see exactly what it was for!

As for the Boarding Pass, RSVP and Fun Fact About Boston, I created all of them from scratch using MS Word. Literally I had a blank page in front of me when I first started. But it quickly all came together. And it was pretty simple once I knew how I wanted them to look. I wanted them all to have some of the same characteristics so I was able to copy and paste a bit.

Oh and if you can't tell, I blurred out most of our address where it says Terminal and Gate. You know, because I wouldn't want all of you to think you needed to show up to the birthday party, too. :)

Fun Facts are becoming a sort of tradition for B's invitations. We did them last year mainly for the family and friends that are rarely around B. They serve as some insight on what he's up to. Like what he's doing, saying and loving. We plan to keep the tradition going until he tells us its lame. :)

Same goes with the RSVP cards we put in with the invitations. We sent them out last year as well. They are addressed and pre-stamed for everyone. All they have to do is fill them out, check the box, pop them in the envelope and mail them back. It seems to be easier for people to do that rather can call, text or have to email us their RSVP. Again, probably going to another tradition for us.

Addressed to the birthday boy, of course.

Here they are just before being put into the outer envelope. I "wrapped" the rsvp envelope around the actual invitation since my slit was too short for the envelope to fit behind the rsvp card.

I got address labels and put the same airplane I used on the boarding pass on the label so they were jazzed up some. Then I wrapped orange striped washi tape around it.

On the back I just used our family stamp that has our address in case some of them got lost int he mail, they would come back to us. :)

These were so much easier than last year's invites but just as cute in our eyes! :) I hope I was able to give some of you some inspiration to create your own invitations!!!

Thank you to Giggles Galore for blogging about this and allowing me to find you and this fun project! Your invitation is absolutely amazing! Would you consider making the template available for use? I'm wiling to pay for the download! Thank you!